Birgit RathsmannNew York, NY

Artist’s Statement

The most oppressive feature of the concrete world: everything ends, is limited, and is doomed to fail. Try to think of a world without this feature. It feels like your mind is about to pop at it's seams. Paradoxically, we do it all the time, just to get out of bed in the morning. Creating and communicating through art, literature, science or public discourse, means contending with this paradox. At this time, as a creative person with one leg in the stone age, the other leg in the future, it's hard to avoid entanglement with ambiguity. Navigating the world involves a process of abstracting particulars, and manipulating and co-joining previous abstractions. Intellectual inquiry exists under a cloud of doubt: do abstract entities exist, or are they just ideas in our minds, metaphysical fictions? Functioning at all requires deep investment in a type of language that allows for the honest exploration of the contradictions involved. My creative process is circuitous, an art discovery can be followed by a need to write, a lecture may lead to an image, an equation to a film.